arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-16
Answer-Conditioned Chains of Thought Degrade Verifiable-Reasoning Distillation in Large Language Models
Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Suhyune Son, Dongyub Jude Lee, Sungbin Han, Sugyeong Eo, et al.
A standard recipe for distilling the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is to sample chains of thought from the model, keep those that reach the correct final answer, and fine-tune on the survivors. When sampling fails, a common fix shows the generator the gold ans…